Sure your ancestors contrived your narrow streets in the days of wheel-barrows, before those greater engines, carts, were invented. Is your climate so hot, that as you walk you need umbrellas of tiles to intercept the sun? or are your shambles so empty, that you are afraid to take in fresh air, lest it should sharpen your stomachs? Oh, the goodly landscape of Old Fish-street! which, if it had not the ill luck to be crooked, was narrow enough to have been your founder’s perspective; and where the garrets, perhaps not for want of architecture, but through abundance of amity, are so narrow, that opposite neighbours may shake hands without stirring from home. Is unanimity of inhabitants in wide cities better exprest than by their coherence and uniformity of building, where streets begin, continue, and end, in a like stature and shape?[45] But yours, as if they were raised in a general resurrection, where every man hath a several design, differ in all things that can make a distinction. Here stands one that aims to be a palace, and next it, one that professes to be a hovel; here a giant, there a dwarf; here slender, there broad; and all most admirably different in faces, as well as in their height and bulk. I was about to defy any Londoner, who dares to pretend there is so much ingenious correspondence in this city, as that he can show me one house like another; yet your houses seem to be reversed and formal, being compared to the fantastical looks of the moderns, which have more ovals, niches, and angles, than in your custards, and are enclosed with pasteboard walls, like those of malicious Turks, who, because themselves are not immortal, and cannot dwell for ever where they build, therefore wish not to be at charge to provide such lastingness as may entertain their children out of the rain; so slight and prettily gaudy, that if they could move, they would pass for pageants. It is your custom, where men vary often the mode of their habits, to term the nation fantastical; but where streets continually change fashion, you should make haste to chain up your city, for it is certainly mad. You would think me a malicious traveller, if I should still gaze on your mis-shapen streets, and take no notice of the beauty of your river, therefore I will pass the importunate noise of your watermen, (who snatch at fares, as if they were to catch prisoners, plying the gentry so uncivilly, as if they had never rowed any other passengers than bear-wards,) and now step into one of your peascod-boats, whose tilts are not so sumptuous as the roofs of gondolas; nor, when you are within, are you at the ease of a _chaise-à-bras_.